Guest Voice: Where’s The Shining City?
This is a Guest Voice column by Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s oldest son, who is also a popular radio talk show host.
Where’s The Shining City?
by Michael Reagan
Republicans keep longing for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan to pop up and win the GOP presidential nomination, but thus far not one of the current candidates has shown that he has the vaguest notion of what made my father the great president he was — his vision of the America it is capable of becoming based on his unbounded optimism and faith in the ability of fellow Americans to do the right thing when told the truth.
They keep going off on tangents, arguing about the religious faith of one of their number, or about the legality of using lawn service companies that hire illegal aliens, or how much a former mayor spent on security for himself and his mistress, but not a single word about what matters most – a vision of what kind of America will result if they win the presidency.
The American people crave to see the vision of the shining city on the hill my Dad promised and went a long way towards creating, yet not a single one of the GOP candidates has said a word about how they plan to get us there, or even mentioned it’s where they want to take us, or what it would be like once we got there.
The voters are being left with a slate of candidates whose vision of the kind of nation they imagine remains a mystery. Instead they concentrate on attacking one another, thus violating my Dad’s 11th commandment that Republicans must refrain from going after their party rivals.
This is a serious defect. If the men who seek the opportunity to win the presidency either have no idea of what kind of America they want to help create as president, or worse, are afraid to explain their vision to the electorate, the Republican party will deserve to go down in defeat next year. A party that has no promises for a bright and attainable future is a party that has no promise.
Unless I am very much mistaken, the people are fed up with candidates’ grandiose schemes to make Washington more efficient, the economy stronger, our foreign policy more effective or how they would handle illegal immigration matters. They have been hearing those un-kept promises for years.
What they haven’t been hearing from the people who want their votes is the promise of a future where America reaches the full potential the founding fathers envisioned over 230 years ago – a nation where equal opportunity is available for all, where government is once again the servant of the people and not their master, where truth is more important than political correctness, where their hard-earned wages are not squandered on wasteful and foolish government programs, and where elected legislators and not unelected judges enact the laws.
This is an America where principles, not programs, govern our lives and political activities. This is a shining city on the hill.
The Republican candidates, for reasons I can’t fathom, cannot see that shining city, or if they can, are unable to explain what it would be like under their administration.
On the Democratic side, there is no problem envisioning a future under their authority. Instead of envisioning a shining city on a hill, they see a Marxist municipality which on close inspection turns out to be just another one of those socialist slums which litter the garbage bin of history.
If Republicans refuse to take the blinders off their eyes and look to a future in the shining city, they will lose the election next year, and the nation will begin its dreary trek to the socialist slums where everybody will have an equal opportunity to be miserable.
Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.” ©2007 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc.
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11 Responses to “Guest Voice: Where’s The Shining City?”
The GOP field is weak, and this Reagan writeup reminds us all (something the GOP always faces as a disadvantage by nature, the “conservatives as negativists and pessimists” belief (false as it often is) while Democrats and liberals have new naive kids every year and a growing group of entitlement dependents year by year and can make the “liberals as positivists and optimists” belief (false as it very often is).
Aside from that, it really is true this year: The GOP field offers Americans nothing positive, much less innovative. If I am incorrect, please tell me (us) what they offer that is so.
Sorry about the extra left parenthesis. While I admire Holly’s conciseness (value per character posted), sometimes I like to run away with a topic and a side note I was inserting became a fully-fledged statement of its own.
It is false that conservatives offer us the old, negative, pessimistic, static, while liberals offer us the new, positive, optimistic, dynamic (note to Dems and libs: seize and use these words frequently about yourselves and your opponents), with the classic setup on television by liberals featuring the liberal as a younger, attractive, articulate person matched against an older, tired or unattractive-looking, Grizzled Old Buzzard.
But it’s a common view and that’s the natural disadvantage (along with the Democrats’ “ignorance bloc” that boosts Dem vote totals) the GOP faces and will always face (especially with a liberal media an adversary of the GOP).
My point on this thread is that the GOP’s predicament in this election rises above the level of being disadvantaged. Even by the standards of common beliefs about the two parties, which place the GOP at a disadvantage, the GOP field this time sends us a signal that rises well above the noise. This election season, they are truly offering us nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing to make us hopeful if they were elected and desire to elect them.
If I be wrong (nice, grizzled-old-buzzard use of the subjunctive), please post corrective information.
May that classic photo of Reagan not engender any of the hatred and worse directed at Reagan by those who resented rejection by Americans of old-style US liberalism (and radical liberalism, too) and who have directed much more pathological behavior nowadays toward our current President Bush.
Let’s keep it on the GOP. What can and what should they offer us? They’re lighter than Dems Lite right now.
“What can and what should they offer us?”
For starters, how about offering an acknowledgement of the serious mistakes they made that led our country in the wrong direction, and than an apology for doing so? I could certainly respect that. Then maybe they could outline what their vision for America is so folks could have some expectation of what they would do differently. Now I don’t really expect any of that to be forthcoming, but since you asked the question, I thought it deserved an honest answer.
Yeah St. Ron, who armed and trained Osama, made sure Iran had replacement parts for those Tomcats we sold the Shah (CONTRA-ry to the law), who tried to shut down military commissaries on the one hand while of course, claiming liberals didn’t support the troops on the other; created a modern economic depression with his voodoo economics (yeah, some of us actually haven’t forgotten the highest unemployment rate in post-war history was under St. Reagan) good lord, I could go on and on, but it just makes my head hurt. No, Ronnie wasn’t a very good president, but he did play one on teevee.
No matter, bygones are bygones and all that. But while we’re talking about ignorance blocs, it would be wise to note that the Republicans actually have one or two decent candidates running this year. The problem is, the Republican Party (beginning under Nixon but perfected under St. Ronnie) has made it’s bread and butter issues those that most appeal to the ignorant (you know guns, God ‘n gays) and now no one is left in the party but the ignorant. So these one or two decent candidates have no constituency anymore in the Party.
The Republican Party made its bed, and is now forced to sleep in it…
Good night. The party is over.
Well, I wasn’t a fan of Reagan’s, but he beats this crop of Republicans by a mile. He had the common sense to pull out of Lebanon, understanding that that was a fight he didn’t fully understand and could not win. Also, he got the 60% rule – which says that if you get 60% of your agenda- you are a winner. That makes him a genius in comparison to W. Finally, he did offer a positive future for the country—even if it was a stingy one for the lower classes.
The current GOP seems to thrive on xenophobia–the ’08 campaign will paint the Democrats as enablers of little brown men who want to take back the southwest for Mexico.
We have seen your shining city on a hill, it’s a beautiful castle made of white marble around which there are huge & gorgeous mansions, the whole thing is surrounded by a wall & moat to keep the peasants who live in the shantytown outside the walls from coming in.
DQ-Sounds a lot like South Africa under apartheid.
Most Republican-leaning voters believe this.
a) numbers from the GOP-voter Pew report (see following numbers on Bush and direction).
Bush job approval
Approve US 67% IA 80% NH 55% SC 72%
Disapprove US 22% IA 16% NH 35% SC 19%
Don’t know US 11% IA 4% NH 10% SC 9%
Prefer a GOP candidate who will…
Continue Bush’s policies
US 29% IA 40% NH 26% SC 38%
Take country in a different direction
US 60% IA 53% NH 66% SC 51%
Don’t know
US 12% IA 7% NH 8% SC 7%
b) And of course there are the 2006 election results that were anti-Republican.
Which way to go, Don’t know is 12-7-8-11. Sorry.
That defines a supermajority for some federal actions. Two-thirds is the other common number. If you are a stickler like me, you’ll want the Golden or Divine Proportion (ratio of minority to majority is also ratio of majority to the whole) of 61.8 (or if you want to be more precise, 61.8034) per cent. (62 votes in the Senate)
* * *
I want to add one more thing from the Pew report on GOP (not Dem, GOP) voters, about what I have said that Evil Gummint Health Kare is a mainstream, no longer a radical leftist, idea:
As with Huck’s rise and a hoped for Hillary’s fall, don’t give too much weight to us in Iowa.